UPDATE: Sarris was known for considering film directors to be auteurs, engaged in a creative process when they made a movie analoguous to a painter or a novelist. It is a dubious concept for several reasons, such as, for example, the perpetually evolving economics of the film industry and the large, variegated, talented group of people required to make a movie on both sides of the camera. Fassbinder was considered a classic example of an auteur, and yet those who worked with him, cinematographers, set designers, actors and costume designers all acknowledged the latitude he gave them. Usually, a general instruction was enough, as when he told the costume designer for Berlin Alexanderplatz that the prostitute characters in late 1920s Berlin were middle class women trying to survive, and that their dress should reflect it. A commercial studio production is always the result of the accumulated efforts of many creative workers. Sarris' description of film directors as auteurs will probably be remembered more for facilitating the marketing of films, for branding them, than for its accuracy in explaining how films are made. In any event, none of this detracts from the fact that he had an acute sense of the the most artistically compelling films of his era.

INITIAL POST: Film critic Andrew Sarris died yesterday at the age of 83. Upon looking over his lists of best films going back to the late 1950s, I was stunned. When something new, dynamic and provocative was released, such as, for example, Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract, he recognized its importance immediately. For his selection of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz as the best release of the 1980s alone, he is entitled to enduring, unqualified posthumous respect. And, if he failed to perceive the brilliant, harsh diversity of 1960s Japanese film and experience the joys of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema of the 1990s beyond Wong Kar-wai (oddly enough, Sarris selected one of his lesser efforts, Fallen Angels, for a ten best list), well, nobody's perfect.

Labels: Film Notes, Obituaries

With my wife and son away to visit relatives, I decided to spend the evening watching a movie. After wandering around the local video store (yes, we still have them in Sacramento), I finally selected Spike Lee's 25th Hour from 2002. Based upon the novel of the same name by David Benioff, the film relates the story of a young Irish Catholic man, Monty Brogan, spending his last day in New York City before serving a seven year prison term for possession of heroin for sale. While otherwise purportedly faithful to the original, Lee placed the events of the narrative within the context of the city's post-9/11 malaise. Critics made much of this in their contemporaneous reviews, but, viewed nine years later, it comes across as an unnecessary extravagance, an overwrought emotional symbolism that distracts from the compelling performances of an excellent ensemble cast.

Indeed, a conversation between two of Brogan's friends in a high rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero is one of the worst compositional choices made by Lee and his cinematographer in the entire film. Apparently, they decided that judiciously distributed visual background markers of the aftermath of the attacks weren't enough, something more akin to the melodramatic intensity of Eisenstein was required. The fact that it comes across more like the campy voluptuousness of DeMille is indicative of the immensity of the error. But this is what you get with Lee, moments of daring and insight mixed with apparent amateurish gaffes. In this, Lee deserves a perverse respect for his refusal to conform to the expectations of a more disciplined formalism that accompanied his early successes, and perhaps, one discerns an aesthetic here, one centered around a conscious recognition that there is a powerful synergy that results from this erratic technique, a belief that life is, by turns, angry, passionate, comical and uncontrollable and any sincere film about it must be as well.

If so, Lee succeeds or fails based upon whether there is a transcendental quality to his films beyond the sum of their parts. In 25th Hour, there is, but it doesn't become apparent until the last thirty minutes. Before then, the actors, typical of a Lee film, provide great performances that keep the audience engaged in what would otherwise be a pedestrian story. All the way down the line, from Edward Norton as Brogan, to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper as his friends Jacob Elinsky and Frank Slaugherty, to Rosario Dawson as his girlfriend Naturelle Rivera to Brian Cox as his father, James, they provide uniformly nuanced, carefully developed characterizations that give the story a naturalistic feel. Lee may be a controversial director, but no one can dispute his ability to select actors for his films who invariably provide strong performances.

In these last thirty minutes, submerged threads of the narrative come to the fore: the difficulty of preserving trust in a passionate relationship, the ability of a father to pass his knowledge and experiences on to his son and the near impossibility of living anything other than an amoral life in a city as corrupted as New York City. Two sequences highlight this last theme, Brogan's internalized angry, bigoted diatribe about the city's inhabitants and a surprising ending that serves as a more profound, emotionally true repudiation of it. From the vantage point of 2012, 25th Hour is actually a powerful premonition of the social withdrawal and survivalism associated with the aftermath of the 2008 global recession, evocative of a more recent film about precisely this subject, The Girlfriend Experience. In such a world, as profiled by Lee in this film, there is no place for anyone other than those who accept the primacy of money, power and violence, and those who cannot do so are left with trying to imagine a refuge beyond their reach.

Labels: American Culture, Film Notes, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Too bad Fassbinder is no longer with us. Few, if any, so astutely recognized the perseverance of fascist values in postwar Germany, sublimated in the guise of the bourgeois values of work and frugality than he did, with its attendant consequences resulting from the suppression of the libido. In films like The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, he addressed the joyful, contradictory features of contemporary capitalism, one defined by the duality of austerity and excess. Through the character of Maria Braun, a smart, savvy women, who, reminscent of Scarlett O'Hara during Reconstruction, exploits the entreprenuerial spirit of the time to rise to great heights during the German economic miracle of the 1950s, he prefigured the rise of Merkel.

In Katzelmacher, Fassbinder exposed the enduring German sense of racial superiority in regard to the peoples of southern Europe, and the sexual jealousies connected to it, dramatized by means of the hostility of the young German working class characters to the Greek immigrant, Jurgos. Such attitudes have been on prominent display during the current Eurozone crisis, with Germans and the German media purveying crude stereotypes about the purportedly profligate Greeks so as to justify the colonization of the country by financial interests aligned with the German state. Merkel's proposal for a new Eurozone is based upon implicitly bigoted assumptions about countries like Italy and Greece, as revealed through the notion that Germans, through the administrative processes of the European Union, must seize power from them and act as their firm, disciplinarian parents.

Labels: Europe, Film Notes, Germany, Greece, IMF, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

Just before leaving on vacation, I had the opportunity to see Patricio Guzman's epic documentary, The Battle of Chile, at the Pacific Film Archive. In this approximately four and a half hour film, released in 1975, he profiles the intensifying class conflict during the presidency of Salvador Allende that culminated in the 1973 coup. Fortunately, for those of you who are interested, the film is available on DVD.

Guzman lived in Chile during the events in question, and filmed them, and the public response to them, as they happened. His emphasis is upon the transformation of society by collective, popular action, and the challenges associated with such an endeavor, as most concisely expressed in a famous sentence from Allende's last speech during the coup: History is ours and the people make it. Within the polarized, politically charged climate of Chile in the early 1970s, such a seemingly homogenized statement of political rhetoric constituted a commitment of perpetual resistance. Guzman's effort to smuggle the footage for the film out of Chile to Sweden so that it could be edited and publicly released was one form of such resistance.

For it was within Chile that the neoliberals entered their Garden of Eden, implementing policies of extreme austerity and privatization by means of a destabilization of society orchestrated by the CIA, ITT and the AFL-CIO and the subsequent authoritarian social controls associated with a military regime. It was here that Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, with their purported concern about ensuring that people are free to choose, persuaded General Augusto Pinochet to radically implement capital friendly, market based policies against the will of much of the Chilean populace. In an instance of dialectical irony, the truck drivers, copper workers and middle class people that served in the vanguard of opposition to Allende found themselves among the victims of Pinochet's policies. People around the world have been fighting the export of these neoliberal policies with varying degrees of success ever since. Guzman conveys the ferocity of the initial struggle within Chile as a sort of fatalistic, documentary noir.

Of course, this is a well known history, a tale told many times, most recently by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. Lesser known is the provocation for the coup, the vision of society that so threatened the middle class, the military and economic elites, including investors thousands of miles away in the United States. In his documentary, Guzman focuses upon the people and social movements that sought to socialize Chilean society and the opposition to them. As Part 1 began, I was overwhelmed by the emotional political participation of people within Chilean society. From the socially alienated, politically disengaged world of 2011, I almost thought that The Battle of Chile was a newly created film genre, the political science fiction period film. One cannot dismiss this by claiming that Guzman was speaking solely with politically engaged people, as he conducted many of his interviews with people from all walks of life, especially those involved in industrial production. He is seemingly everywhere, filming mass rallies, election campaigns, factory occupations, land seizures and organized campaigns to transport people and supply food during the effort to disrupt the Chilean economy and interviewing the participants.

By doing so, Guzman reveals the collective liberatory possibilities embedded within the emergence of popular power, the fusion of political and economic power within communities, administered through increasingly anti-authoritarian forms of social organization, something that, in a different context, Samuel Huntington alarmingly described as a democratic distemper, a situation whereby people demanded more of the government while becoming increasingly resistant to its authority. Within Chile, democratic distemper took the specific form of workers, who had been exploited by their employers and investors for decades while living in terrible conditions, responding to the election of Allende by accelerating the pace of the nationalization of some sectors of the economy by taking over taking over factories themselves. Meanwhile, peasants carried out their own land reform independent of the government by taking land for themselves. Parallel to these efforts, people mobilized to distribute necessities, such as food, during times of scarcity, and provide transportation during CIA financed strikes by transport workers, on a more egalitarian, socially conscious basis. Such actions, combined with the alliance by local economic elites and the United States to make the daily lives of Chileans more and more chaotic and difficult, shattered the effort of Allende to administer a peaceful path to socialism by taking control of the commanding heights of the economy for the benefit of middle and lower class Chileans.

The argument on the left as to the whether such actions facilitated the coup remains, as near as I can tell, unresolved. My impression, after watching the film, is that Guzman sided with those who believe that Allende should have more forcefully embraced the seizure of economic power by workers and peasants within their communities and the creation of local institutions to administer them. Of course, I can't say whether the socialist experiment in Chile would have survived if Allende, and the coalition of left political parties in support of him, had decided to do so, but I can say with more confidence that this democratization of the economy must have been the most frightening form of democratic distemper that imperialists like Huntington could imagine. The coup was, in essence, the Huntington solution to this peril, the reassertion of hierarchical political power and the cultivation of political apathy. In Chile, both were violently enforced. If private property and the hegemony of capital are to be preserved, there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. One suspects that Pinochet was more interested in the social dimension of the policies of the Chicago School, the potential for eliminating possible sources of collective resistance through atomization, than he was in its economic theory, which ultimately, within less than 20 years, resulted in such a severe economic crisis than he was forced from power.

But Guzman also has a clear eye for the internal problems associated with economic democratization. For example, such a process makes great demands of the populace. In one telling sequence, he films a meeting where a cadre attempts to persuade a group of workers that they need to proceed carefully because they work in a plant owned by a Swiss company. Switzerland, he earnestly explains to them, is a member of the Club of Paris, and the Club makes important decisions related to the Chilean foreign debt. Needless to say, they are not convinced, with one person telling the cadre that the workers in the plant will not understand it, that he needs to address issues of importance to them. Guzman had a great insight here, one that can be misunderstood. It is not so much that the workers were too self-centered or ignorant to engage with what the apparently better educated, more articulate cadre had to say. Instead, he contrasts the self-confidence of the workers, and a perspective based upon experience, with the practical diffidence of the cadre derived from abstract knowledge, all manifestations of the difficulty in communication that they must overcome. In this, Guzman echoes Godard, without losing his optimism. Hidden within this nascent collective discourse is the sinister allure of leisure, one of the most significant creations of capitalism in the last 100 years. Working your shift, participating in the distribution of food during your off days and going to meetings at night is emotionally and physically exhausting. Better to leave the decisions and the provision of services to others and watch television.

Neoliberalism, leisure and their accompanying disassembly of collective forms of social organization, have come at a high cost. This is one of the themes that has been engrafted onto The Battle of Chile with the passage of time. Mass mobilization against the brutalities of global capitalism are no longer possible, and it is absurd to believe that it can peaceably tamed through the electoral process, as was attempted in Chile, with the possible exception of South America. Hence, they have been replaced by what is commonly called terrorism. In Italy, Germany and the United States, the process was surprisingly rapid, with mass protest movements fragmenting into covert, small group violence within about 10 years. None of them sparked resistance sufficient to threaten the established order, and, now, decades later, hostility to capitalist excess in all three places is primarily expressed through xenophobia. Most of the participants ended up isolated from the marginalized people in society that motivated them. Meanwhile, with the developmental aspirations of the lesser developed world aborted, such violence has persisted, but it has not politically inspired the millions of wageless people who live in it. So far, as noted, it is only in South America where the residue of the Chilean experience still resonates, as described by Ben Dangl, but the achievements to date have been of a mild, Keynesian nature. One of the forgotten aspects of the coup against Allende is that it signaled the beginning of a coordinated, attempted extermination of the left throughout the southern cone with assistance of the CIA, a campaign known as Operation Condor. At minimum, it has been estimated that the governments of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay killed 60,000 people and incarcerated 400,000 more.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Chile, Death Squads, Elections, Film Notes, Marxism, South America

Unknown to few here in the US except to Pacific Film Archive denizens like myself, Hideo Takamine personified the post-war experience of Japanese women and the ongoing evolution of gender roles in numerous film roles:

Hideko Takamine, a Japanese actress who over the course of nearly 200 films developed from an endearing child star into a powerful representative of the Japanese woman’s search for identity and autonomy in the years after World War II, died on Dec. 28 in Tokyo. She was 86.

Ms. Takamine, who often seemed to be gallantly fighting back tears with her famously gentle smile, was widely regarded by Japanese and foreign critics as one of the three great actresses of the classical Japanese cinema. Her two peers were the aristocratic Kinuyo Tanaka, who worked extensively with the director Kenji Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff) and died in 1977, and Setsuko Hara, whose portrayals of modern middle-class women were associated with the films of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

Ms. Takamine was most notably the muse of Mikio Naruse, who, although not as well known in the west as Mizoguchi and Ozu, is frequently ranked as equally important in Japanese film history. For Naruse, Ms. Takamine often played women from rural or lower-middle-class backgrounds who were forced to make their own way in the world, often saddled with weak or unfaithful men.

Among her best-known work with Naruse was Floating Clouds (1955), in which she played a secretary in love with her married boss, sticking with him from a wartime post in Indochina to contemporary Tokyo despite his coldness, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), in which she played a widow working as a bar hostess in Tokyo’s Ginza district.

As noted in the Los Angeles Times obituary:

Hideko Takamine was one of the most beloved and accomplished of Japan's film stars, said Kevin Thomas, a former Times staff writer who reviewed Japanese films from 1962 to 1985. She was beautiful, and she had tremendous range and versatility.

After beginning as sort of Japan's answer to Shirley Temple, Thomas said, she emerged as one of Japan's greatest star actresses in the postwar period, which was a tremendous period for Japanese cinema.

In the wake of the war, Thomas said, there was this renaissance of Japanese filmmaking. They could discuss the war and assess blame, the impact of the occupation, the growing emancipation of women — all this kind of stuff. There was this terrific ferment, and it was a really creative period.

And for many Japanese, Phyllis Birnbaum wrote in her 1990 New Yorker profile of Takamine, she was as much a part of postwar Japan as the strange-tasting powdered milk distributed by the American military.

Many of Takamine's heroines were typical of the women who had grown up after the war, film historian Donald Richie told Birnbaum. Like so many Japanese women then, they wanted more out of life, but couldn't get it.

The war may have been over, women found, but they weren't better off. They were still fairly unhappy. So the kind of roles Takamine played fit the zeitgeist, may have even made that zeitgeist.

While one of her most well known films mentioned in the New York Times obituary, Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds, plays a little long, even for me, Takamine's performance as a women who works at a civilian outpost of the empire in Indochina, and subsequently returns to an impoverished Japan is still remarkable. Indeed, the film, and the novel of the same title upon which it is based, provide a striking, understated presentation of imperial occupation, defeat and the social turmoil that result from them. Yukiko Koda, the protagonist played by Takamine, is a victim of the fascism that fueled the empire and persists in post-war Japan through the survival of a patriarchal social order despite the catastrophic military defeat:

Even in it’s vivid depiction of the female protagonist, Naruse’s outlook differs significantly from his illustrious peers. Ozu’s heroines were often the epitome of the ideal Japanese woman, while many of Mizoguchi’s female characters were beautiful, tragic figures oppressed by society, but whose suffering and sacrifice also in some way underlined their spiritual nobility. Naruse’s depiction, in being more realistic and less conciliatory, does not offer any respite. It too displays the keen eye for the sense of tragedy and suffering, but incisively cuts through the weaknesses and flaws of a strong-willed, yet weak-hearted woman, one only too prone to letting herself get betrayed by the men in her life and one too unsure of the direction her life should take to righteously feel grieved about being wronged. Yukiko is torn between her love to Tomioka and a desperate need to have some kind of a stable life, and to see her life slip slowly but surely into a downward spiral is as frustrating as it is heart-wrenching. For her needs, both financial and emotional, she is often at the mercy of her brother-in-law for the former and Tomioko for the latter, when there is possibly no salvation in sight from either. The overbearing sense of futility is told with a cold, almost nihilistic detachment.

Both Yukiko and Tomioka, her love interest, possess that tragic dimension so characteristic of many of Fassbinder's finest creations, a sense of the emotional inadequacies and cruelties of our present lives, while being incapable of perceiving any alternative. Hence, the inevitable nihilism that overwhelms both. Yukiko, as a victim of the Japanese patriarchy, resists it as best she can, while Tomioka perpetually falls back upon an ingrained exploitation of his privileged male status, leaving several victims along the way, seemingly oblivious. I recommend the novel, written by Fumiko Hayashi, highly for her matter of fact, folkloric invocation of day to day life and language, as experienced by a finely developed cast of characters in addition to the protagonist.

Labels: Book Reviews, Feminism, Film Notes, Japan, Obituaries

Upon comparing Abukhalil's extraordinary review of Carlos, based upon his knowledge of the Palestinian struggle with my earlier, mundane one, written in the voice of someone who related to it as a work of cinematic art, I recognized the extent to which it is possible to interweave Zionist, imperialist values within an otherwise appealing transgressive, countercultural narrative. Indeed, they go down much easier with an engaged, educated audience than the crude stereotypes associated with the neoconservatives. An audience that might otherwise blanch at them in a common, melodramatic good versus evil plot finds them more appetizing when encountered in the distanced, elliptical, emotionally subdued tones of the arthouse.

Beyond this, the facility by which a skilled director like Assayas can accomplish this task raises serious questions as to whether the standards by which the cinema has been evaluated display a Eurocentric bias, especially in regard to how the social realities of non-European peoples can be manipulated to their detriment by recourse to subjective methods of narrative and cinematography. It seems to me that a film criticism that exalts the successful execution of these methods, as well those adopted by the performers, necessarily has a tendency to diminish the significance of cultural representation. My conclusion is that, if you want to effectively propagandize among elites by means of film, you will do better to select an Assayas than a Bruckheimer. But, maybe, there is nothing new about this. After all, D. W Griffith is considered more important because of his storytelling technique than his racism, and Goebbels was well aware of this, too, if one believes Fritz Lang's story that Goebbels offered him a position as head of the German film industry in 1933 after Goebbels watched The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (which wasprompted banned by the Nazis as a threat to the public order).

Of course, the challenge is to recognize the reactionary qualities in such works, while appreciating the artistry, as Edward Said did when evaluating the literature of Austen and Conrad. Or, for that matter, what Abukhalil does himself when acknowledging the great works of orientalist historiography. In any event, here is an excerpt from his review, which I strongly recommend that you read in its entirety:

. . . I should have expected the movie would be horrible when the New York Times Magazine, which opposes Arabs and their causes except for those of Muhammad Dahlan, Salam Fayyad and Mahmoud Abbas (if they can be considered Arabs), enthusiastically praised the director and the movie’s research. This is important because I found the movie’s political feel, purely American in a racist and Zionist sense (according to the dominant American culture, so as not to generalize about the American people). The movie exaggerates “Carlos’” importance in the Palestinian revolution’s contemporary history and even in Wadie Haddad’s history of organizing. The man was only a footnote in the Palestinian people’s struggle as was Lawrence of Arabia a footnote in the lesser Arab Revolution. Assayas needed to exaggerate his role in order to market the movie: there are hundreds of revolutionaries with Arab names but nobody has heard of them. In other words, that “Carlos” was famous and Annis Naqqash unknown, indicates the skillfulness of the latter, not the former. Haddad didn’t want to create celebrities; he wanted to create revolutionaries. The revolutionary’s usefulness diminishes with fame and/or its pursuit. Old revolutionaries who lived the Jordan phase (before and after the September massacres) remember “Carlos.” In his first military courses he was notably brave, physically resilient and extremely enthusiastic. Those who trained with him in Jordan know he felt restrained by standing in line and training (it appears that Palestinian groups’ trainings were influenced by that of armies. This is a result of lack of experience in guerilla warfare. See Yazid Sayigh’s book Armed Struggle and Search for a State in spite of its right-wing leaning). Carlos used to object and demand more rigorous training. He was also skillful at shooting. This brought him attention as a fighter, not as a revolutionary leader as the movie portrayed.

Here is where the movie’s fiction starts. “Carlos” becomes a Palestinian leader and peer to Wadie Haddad himself. You see him at a meeting of Palestinian groups’ leaders called by Yuri Androbov. “Carlos’” story overshadows the negative aspects of the Palestinian revolution’s experience of attracting people of all backgrounds without exception. Opportunists, hooligans, criminals and intelligence agents joined the revolution. The revolution didn’t examine their backgrounds. A Palestinian entered a training camp in Al-Burj and saw a man training. He angrily asked the political supervisor: what is this man doing here? He was told that he was a comrade from the American University of Beirut. “Comrade?” he exclaimed. “I’ve known him since childhood and he’s an old Phalangist.” He refused to participate in the training (that “comrade’s” colleagues noticed that he completely disappeared after 1982 without trace). The revolution should have scrutinized the backgrounds of those who suddenly appeared in training camps and organization offices and asked to join. Of course, there were sincere internationalists militants but there were opportunists and criminals also.

Who decides “Carlos’” reality? It’s a relative matter. I consider him more of a rash rebel who turned to opportunism after the Vienna operation, if not before. It suffices that his name is connected to the distortion of the Palestinian revolution’s name internationally. The movie tried to depict Palestinian struggle as an opportunist, criminal and terrorist endeavor. There is no mistake that this is the movie’s message. The best proof of the movie’s Zionism is the complete absence of Israel from the plot. Israel is completely absent from criminal and terrorist operations in Europe although Israel had started terrorism in Europe by sending explosives to embassies in the forties (the otherwise serious Economist magazine erred in a recent article as it failed to mention Israel’s pioneering role in sending letter bombs). The movie showed no concern for victims among the Palestinian people and other Arab civilians in Europe or thousands of victims in the Arab world. But it wanted to emphasize for the viewer foreign victims of Arab violence (such as the scene of shooting a pregnant French woman in Beirut. One doesn’t know if this actually occurred or if it was one of the many lies the movie fabricated). During a seventies’ recording of Bassam Abu Sharif explaining the attack on the Zionist Marks and Spencer’s owner in London, the director should have informed the viewer, at least cursorily, that the reason behind burns and wounds on Abu Sharif’s face was the Zionist letter bomb from Israel, which is dear to Assayas and his crew.

Haddad targeted the owner of Marks and Spencer for funding Herut party and Zionist causes. The movie wanted to depict the Arab revolutionary as hostile to Jews as Jews (only one German objected to hostility to Jews while in reality the matter was debated among the ranks of the leadership and membership, but the director deliberately mis-portrayed Palestinian organizations and characterized them as fascist and dictatorial. Not all leaders of Palestinian groups were like Yasir Arafat, and even he was questioned by his cohorts especially in the early years).

If you watch the movie, you will quickly discover how the process of presenting the history of this period in intimate terms, as noted in my review, has the effect of creating an allegorical representation of the Palestinian struggle that omits much of its history.

Labels: Film Notes, France, Israel, Palestine, Political Violence, Zionism

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to watch about 4 hours of the approximately 5 1/2 hour French miniseries about the notorious Carlos the Jackal at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. You can also apparently rent a shorter version on cable if you have the Sundance Channel, and it will be released nationally in yet another edited version as well. I hope to watch the remainder of it sometime soon, but I decided to post a review before my initial impressions become stale.

As'ad Abukhalil, the Angry Arab, has said that Carlos is good entertainment, but bad politically, and that's a pretty fair assessment. I probably wouldn't gone to see it except for the fact that one of my favorite directors, Olivier Assayas, made it. I've seen a lot of his movies, going all the way back to Disorder from the mid-1980s, and think highly of him. I've always considered him to be one of the heirs to Fassbinder, with an acute sense of the internal rhythms of film narrative, a highly developed sense of the banalities of life and an empathy for what cultural studies types describe as transgressive behaviour. For my review of his movie, Summer Hours, released in the US last year, go here.

Assayas puts all of these qualities to good use in Carlos. His sympathy for transgression enables him to portray all of the characters, including Carlos, non-judgmentally, even sympathetically, and his emphasis upon the banal in the presentation of the most violent and emotional charged scenes strips away the melodramatic manipulation that is such a prominent feature of most American films (or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that he engages in such manipulation more skillfully?). He treats Carlos' celebrity as an off screen fact that distorts his relationships with others instead of allowing it to overwhelm the story. His sense of narrative pacing is remarkable. Much as Gus Van Zant presented the essence of the life of Harvey Milk through a skillful use of interiors, and the extraction of a feeling of intimacy from his public appearances, Assayas accomplishes something similar here. Whereas many directors would have succumbed to the temptation of rendering the assault upon the 1975 OPEC meeting in Vienna in the dynamic, propulsive action film visuals suitable for Blue-Ray, Assayas sticks with his dishwater, documentary style that brings characterization and personal interaction to the forefront. I've never watched 4 hours of a movie that went by so quickly. It is hyponotic.

Some have said that Carlos is the best film that Assayas has ever made, and it is quite fine if you are disinterested in the underlying political themes. Unfortunately, for all of its brilliance, Carlos is a work of cinematic orientalism. With the possible exception of Carlos, Assayas generally portrays the South American and European characters as politically and emotionally responding to an unjust society, while the Arabs are the ones that betray the revolution. Through their contact with the Arabs, they are corrupted by money, seduced by violence and ultimately acquiesce to patriarchal authority. There is a clear binary opposition within the film in terms of the characteristics of European and Middle Eastern society. Given the actual history of the radical left in the US and Europe, where many participants fell prey to them in the absence of any contact with Arabs or Muslims, it borders on being racist. Rather oddly, the Arab characters reminded me of the yakuza ones in Japanese crime films by people like Kinji Fukasaku, which just shows the extent of the contrast. Amazingly, one ends up perceiving Carlos and his European allies as initially more supportive of the Palestinian cause than the Palestinians themselves (with the exception of lower level soldiers). Much of this comes out through the character of one of the German leftists involved in the Vienna attack, Joachim Klein, code name Angie, who explains his subsequent refusal to join Carlos' new group by reference to all the purportedly corrupting features injected as a consequence of their relations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine ("PFLP").

Clearly, Assayas intends us to view Klein sympathetically, but Klein, for all of his idealism, has merely transferred his failings and those of his political movement to a convenient scapegoat, the Arabs, much as the German bourgeoisie similarly did with the Jews a hundred years earlier. Perhaps, I am being unfair, and this was Assayas' intention (there is always a complex ambivalence in his characterizations), but it doesn't look that way when you see it. He may not have been that interested in the Arab and Palestinian aspects of the story anyway, despite their inescapable prominence. He may have just considered the violent struggle for the liberation of the Palestinians, and those associated with it, as a sort of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a plot device necessary for setting the story in motion and not much more. After all, Carlos' unwillingness to align himself with any particular group after being expelled from the PFLP is another variation of the lone wolf against the syndicate, another Franz as presented by Fassbinder in his first film, Love is Colder than Death, while the political and psychological dimensions of radical extremism echo another neglected Fassbinder film, The Third Generation. So, it may well be true that, for Assayas, the primary subject of his concern is the European radical left and Carlos' opportunism, with the Arabs and Palestinians serving as props.

One of the interesting subtexts of the film is the extent to which people can achieve clearly defined political ends through violence. Not surprisingly, Assayas is a pessimist, as shown in a simultaneously frightening and hilarious sequence when Carlos and an associate jump out of a car next to a terminal at Orly Airport in Paris, and, Keystone Cops style, try to blow up an El Al plane with a rocket launcher, only to miss twice and hit two other planes instead. Upon calling in to claim responsibility for the attack, Carlos discovers that a Croatian nationalist group had already done so, because one of the planes that they actually damaged was a Yugoslav one. Similarly, Carlos and the others involved in the assault upon the 1975 OPEC meeting quickly discover that the unpredictable responses to it from erstwhile covert allies make it difficult, if not impossible, to attain their objectives. Assayas also suggests that Carlos and his team were geopolitically manipulated by those who sponsored the assault. Curiously, he ignores the claim that Carlos took advantage of it to enrich himself to the detriment of the mission, a subject that Abukhalil may address in a planned future review of the movie.

To his credit, Assayas starts the movie with the Mossad's assassination of PDLP leader Mohamed Boudia in Paris in 1973. Hence, Carlos' embrace of violence is placed within the context of pre-existing Zionist violence, providing little comfort to the promoters of the current war on terror. Furthermore, throughout the film, prominent political figures, such as those kidnapped by Carlos' team in Vienna, are not portrayed deferentially. One gets the sense that Assayas would have celebrated the audacity of the kidnapping as an appropriate transgressive act if perpetrated for the right reasons, one associated with a more generalized rejection of authority, instead of being carried out by one group seeking to seize the power possessed by another. He gently exposes the hypocrisy of Saudi Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, one of the kidnapped OPEC ministers, a man who objects to his planned killing while representing a regime that hangs people for failing to conform to the strict standards of behavior imposed by his government. This big fish gets away, of course, perhaps serving as a parable for the persistence of the violent, elitist control of our lives that persists to this day.

Labels: American Empire, Film Notes, France, Israel, Palestine, Political Violence, YouTube

Rip Torn may well be one of the most underutilized actors of the last 40 years. His eerie evocation of the banality of the evil through his performance as Richard Nixon in the 1978 TV miniseries, Blind Ambition, has been forgotten, superseded by Anthony Hopkins' subsequent characterization of him for Oliver Stone. Torn searched for the demons within, and often found them, which was not the way to attain stardom.

In Payday, Torn gave a career defining performance as an on the make country music singer, Maury Dann. Dann travels all around the country, performing in front of audiences in small to medium size cities, collecting a share of the gate and record sales. In the pre-MTV, pre-Clear Channel age, performers like Dann could make a good living for themselves and their band members in this way as they assiduously courted local DJs for promotion.

As someone who spent a fair amount of time in the Deep South that forms the backdrop for Dann's ambition to make it to Nashville, so that he can break through to the big time, I can confidently say that the period detail of the movie, filmed on location, is extraordinary. Set in the early 1970s, Dann is performing shows in southern and central Alabama as he heads north towards Tennessee, and the opportunity for national exposure that his manager has worked hard to cultivate. I visited my divorced father around this same time in nearby Macon, Georgia, and I recall a world very similar to the rural motels, restaurants, bars and four lane highways through which Dann explosively circulates. The backup band's use of an International Harvester Travelall to transport themselves and their equipment is a particularly delightful touch.

But Payday is much more than an especially vivid memorialization of time and place within the context of a specific subculture. Nor is it merely a star vehicle for an actor, Torn, who failed to become a star despite his mesmerizing performance. Payday is too merciless in its exposure of the misogyny of male celebrity and the subsequent abuses of the liberatory impulses of the 1960s within the Deep South to work as either nostalgia or hero worship. If anything, it is analoguous to the lack of sentimentality and detached anthropological perspective associated with the 1960s Japanese films of Oshima and Imamura. One can easily imagine Imamura making Payday if he had been hired by a Hollywood studio as Antonioni was for Zabriskie Point.

For Payday has two enduring central themes, the pernicious consequences of the sexual revolution and liberalized drug use within a culture in which patriarchy, and the violence associated with it, are deeply ingrained. In this, it can be truly be said to be a quintessential American film. One gets an immediate sense of this in the film's first scene, where Dann and his band are performing one of his signature songs, Country Girl, at a club. During the performance of the song, the audience consumes alcohol freely and there is an unmistakeable current of eroticism amongst the audience as well as between the audience and the band. The lyrics of the song itself, about a young woman who rejects the city for the country because of her down home values, provides a contrapuntal commentary.

Prior to leaving the parking lot after the show, Dann talks to Sandy, a young groupie, and persuades her to come into his car, where he proceeds to screw her in the backseat. There is really no other way to say it without suggesting some tenderness or affection that is totally absent. Back at the hotel, we are introduced to Dann's apparent girlfriend, Mayleen Travis, a woman with whom he shares a voracious sexual appetite in a relationship that is otherwise calculated and contentious. In the YouTube clip at the top of this post, Dann throws her out of his Cadillac while traveling to his next gig after she has complained one too many times. He replaces her with a ingenue, Rosamond McClintock. She see him as the way out of her small Alabama town.

In Payday, the sexual revolution has come to the Deep South with a vengence. The rapidly spreading libertinism of popular culture, as expressed in Payday through country music, destroys the ability of communities to enforce conservative social mores. Dann and his band strike sparks wherever they go. He summarizes his philosophy as If you can't smoke it, drink it, spend it or love it . . . . forget it, and his material conception of personal satisfaction proves irresistible. Women in the rural South find themselves liberated to be sexually consumed by men like Dann. The prospect of an erotic relationship in which both partners seek to transcend bourgeois constraints and commerce, as in loulou, is beyond the imaginings of anyone in Payday. Sandy, Mayleen and Rosamond may enjoy their sexual encounters with Dann, but Dann dictates the terms of them.

Drug use, so conspicuously a part of the rock scene, is also a major feature of the country music one in Payday. Dann and his band members smoke cigarettes and marijuana joints, drink alcohol and gobble up a frightening amount of prescription drugs, probably methamphetamines, but such consumption primarily serve the purpose of enabling them to travel long distances and perform with as little rest as possible while surviving the tedium of life on the road. There is a duality to Dann's materialism. One the one hand, sex, drugs and money are enjoyable in a transitory way, but they also enable him and his band to participate in a seemingly unending process of cultural production, a process, need it be said, that is invariably controlled by males.

Unfortunately, they, especially the drugs, render Dann emotionally unstable and prone to violent tempermental outbursts, again, as shown in the YouTube clip, while lifting him, and everyone in his orbit, away from the bonds of community and familial support that might otherwise contain them. It is this dialectic between the productive utility of sex, drugs and money and the combustible consequences of their use that constitutes the centerpiece of the film. Dann is, in effect, attempting to bust through social and class boundaries by reducing himself into a pure instrument of production and consumption. As you might expect, he fails much in the same manner of Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Labels: American Culture, Feminism, Film Notes, Marxism, Sexuality, YouTube

As feminists have noted for decades, the cinema, whether Hollywood or Mosfilm or Bollywood or Hong Kong, has been one of the most effective disseminators of patriarachal values. Indeed, it has masterfully reinterpreted them within a context of global capitalist development. Male characters and concerns are to the forefront, with women cast in subordinate roles, subject to boundaries established by the male dominated family and workplace.

Perhaps, this is why one experiences such a shock when watching loulou, a 1980 film directed by Maurice Pialat with a screenplay by Pialat and Arlette Langman. Anton Bitel of Film4 was apparently one of the few critics who recognized its combustible engagement with class, gender and sexuality. Curiously enough, although the film is named for the male lead performed with the usual muscular dynamism associated with Gerard Depardieu, it is the character of his lover, Nelly, portrayed by Isabelle Huppert with an extraordinary range and subtlety, who grounds the narrative.

At the beginning of the film, Nelly is married to Andre, and works for him as well. Although unclear, it appears that Andre has a prominent position in advertising or television in Paris. Andre is her intellectual mentor, and the dominant figure in their bourgeois marriage. Andre is captivated by Nelly's spontaneity, Nelly by his formalistic rigor. But there is a problem. Nelly is sexually unfulfilled.

Nelly meets Loulou at a dance club where, contrary to American expectations, all classes mix liberally. She dances with him, has a nasty argument with Andre (he finds pop music coarse and primitive) and leaves with Loulou. Loulou is an ex-con, but excellent in bed and surprisingly down to earth in his communication with women, all qualities that Andre lacks. He can be crude, but also surprisingly empathetic and tender, and Nelly is immediately drawn to him.

Nelly is, in effect, shattering the patriarchal demand that women subordinate their sexual and emotional needs to men, and, upon discovering that her bourgeois marriage to Andre is incapable of satisfying them, she abandons it. During the course of doing so, she discovers that Andre cannot, until it is too late, separate affection from possessiveness. Pialat presented all this naturalistically, with the use of a hand held camera, generating audience empathy with Nelly's journey. Along with Langman, he told her story by means of a script that emphasizes emotional insight and conflict over melodramatic convention.

It is precisely the centrality of Nelly to the narrative that makes loulou so compelling. I recently had the opportunity to watch two Godard films from the late 1960s, La Chinoise and Le Gai Savoir, and one gets the impression that Godard subconsciously accepted the old Marxist-Leninist doctrine that the contradiction generated by the exploitation of women was a secondary one, secondary to the primary one between the proletariat and capitalists, and one that would be resolved upon the attainment of a classless society. Neither film, despite the prominence of female characters, addresses the reality of gender relations confronted by Pialat and Langman in loulou. If anything, there is an undercurrent of androgyny in both films, with Godard treating sexuality as a frivolity.

Similarly, I also watched two Eric Rohmer films, My Night at Maud's and Chloe in the Afternoon, and while Rohmer deserves great respect for his emphasis upon marriages between equals, marriages between educated professionals, his primary interest is the allure of bourgeois marriage for men. The wives, as well as the temptresses, serve the purpose of assisting the enlightenment of Rohmer's male protagonists. One wonders what sort of movies Rohmer would have made if he had focused upon the wives instead of the husbands.

In any event, Nelly seeks a transcendent, self-actualizing relationship in the arms of, for lack of better term, a lumpen proletarian. In France and Italy, the 68 generation derided the notion of wage labor, and Pialat suggested that Loulou was one consequence of it, a petty ex-con who doesn't work, and, moreover, lacks any comprehension about how to go about doing so. Alternatively, one can relate to Loulou as representative of that part of French society that historically resisted the capitalist rationalization of the country, that uncouth, raucous part that Hausmann, and, later, DeGaulle, sought to eradicate through their reconstruction of Paris. Pialat's camera explores a Paris where gentrification, a phenomenon that, ironically enough, Andre condemns even as he profits from it, is accomplishing what Hausmann and DeGaulle could not, the explusion of the lower orders from the city.

As Nelly tells Andre, Loulou can't find a job, but she can, and so, she pays the bills and why shouldn't she? It works, but not perfectly so. Loulou worries that Nelly is just another women who loves his cock, failing to recognize that she sought out his cock to discover that there was more to being a woman, more to being a person, than her life with Andre. Andre sarcastically asks her how she talks about literature with Loulou, and she responds that reading it is enough. In other words, she doesn't need Andre anymore, but she does need Loulou, even as she worries about Loulou's dependence upon her. Ultimately, the film ends on a somber note, as both Nelly and Loulou realize that their relationship is ill-suited for a society in which commerce and commodification is ascendant.

Labels: Feminism, Film Notes, France, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Paris

At the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, there was a changing of the guard. An unknown German film director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, asserted the vitality of the New German Cinema, a cinema that would engage international audiences throughout the 1970s, with his first feature length film, Love is Colder than Death. Few seemed to recognize that Fassbinder had commenced a life long effort to delve into fundamental questions of human nature associated with the failure of people to perceive utopian alternatives. Throughout the 1970s, people would become more and more mesmerized by his enterprise, but audiences booed his first effort as they were unable to engage his studied, yet empathetic, portrayal on lumpen proleterian criminals living outside the consumerism and the political radicalism of the time.

Meanwhile, Jean Luc Godard, after a decade of crafting genre bending popular entertainments with radical social themes, aggressed his audience with Le Gai Savior. In Savior, he made a film for television that was rejected by the French national television network that co-produced it. Upon purchasing it, Godard entered it in the festival, where it received an equally chilly response. Many viewers walked out of it. It's not hard to understand why. Centered around the attempt of two young radicals, Emile Rousseau and Patricia Lumumba, to deconstruct sound and image in an abandoned television studio, people versed in the narrative conventions of what Godard described as Hollywood and Mosfilm were no doubt quickly bored and confused. But this was a festival audience, and doesn't fully explain the hostility.

No, there must have been something more to it. Just as Fassbinder suggested that the idealism of 68 was disassociated from the real life experiences of most people, Godard concluded that there was little prospect of transforming society through film. Rousseau and Lumumba discovered that the likelihood of understanding how the great mass of people were influenced by media images was slight, and the possibility of creating a new, engaging cinema that would inspire people to act upon their suppressed utopian aspirations even less so. It is hard to imagine a perspective that would be more outrageous to a 1969 festival audience than this, the equivalent of screening an unapologetic Zionist movie today.

The narrative of Savior, if there can be said to be such a thing, holds up well. It was a visionary movie that audiences could not appreciate. Emile and Partricia spend numerous late night hours in the studio, purportedly over three years, if one relates to the story realistically, in their effort to understand how sounds and images serve the purpose of perverting human communication so as to render collective resistance to capitalism impossible. As such, the story is a a dialogue between two people about the nature of society and the potential for transforming it. Over forty years later, festival audiences have had more exposure to experimental techniques and elliptical plots (consider, for example, directors like Wong Kar-wai, Peter Greenaway, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, all of whom have had their work enthusiastically received), and audiences would have responded favorably to Savior as well if it had been released in the last 20 years.

As you would expect in a Godard film, the acting is first rate, as, in this instance, the roles of Rousseau and Lumumba are performed by Godard film veterans Jean Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto. Both infuse their characters with a youthful mixture of naivete, intellectual curiosity, vulnerability and arrogance. One can even construe their performances as indicative of a repressed passion in which two people find themselves incapable of finding a common language in which to communicate their desire. Indeed, the inability to communicate is exposed as a primary social disability.

Rousseau and Lumumba are leftist intellectual activists. Both purport to act on behalf of the working class in France and around the world, especially the Third World, but neither is capable of relating to it as anything other than an abstraction. Separated from the working class by their education and social status, or, as Bourdieu might have said, their habitus, incapable of recognizing that their separation is an inescapable consequence of the division of physical and mental labor, they flail about in a sea of sounds and images generated by contemporary media, seaching for that organizing principle, that magic key, that will enable them to actually talk to workers and understand them. It is, of course, a futile task, given that they implicitly characterize them as passive recipients of subliminal messages. In this, Godard anticipates Baudrillard, who, not too many years later, derided the notion of a socialist media.

Beyond this, Rousseau and Lumumba are shackled by their investigatory method. Despite being professed radicals, they methodically go about their task, having subconsciously adopted the rigorous standards of French academia. They are, in effect, scientific socialists, quite an irony considering that both are representatives of a radical left movement that publicly repudiated the USSR and the PCF, the French Communist Party. Even as they listen to audio of a speaker maligning the reactionary nature of trade unions and the PCF, they adopt the same analytical approach. An episode in which Rousseau and Lumumba ponder the relationship of the word Stalin to another, seemingly unrelated, phonetically similar word, reveals the ghost that haunts their endeavor.

Labels: Film Notes, France, Marxism, YouTube

See you in 2010, originally posted on June 2, 2009.

Looking back wistfully, Hal Ashby attempted to capture the zeitgeist of that period when the expanding horizons of the 1960s imperceptibly receded. He did so by profiling the life of a popular, libidinous Southern California hair dresser in the final hours leading to the 1968 election. The movie was, of course, Shampoo, and Warren Beatty portrayed the hair dresser, George Roundy, in one of his best performances. Roundy discovers that the power of money and the need for emotional security trumps the willingness of people to take the risks required to achieve personal fulfillment.

Over three decades later, Stephen Soderbergh has remade Shampoo, but, apparently, in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to most people, even movie critics. In The Girlfriend Experience, a high end call girl, Christine, portrayed by Sasha Grey, a porn star, navigates her way through a world that Roundy could have only vaguely anticipated, a world where the circuits of capitalist exchange have moved beyond the commodification of sex to the commodification of personal relationships themselves. In a disjointed narrative that remains faithful to the broad outline of Shampoo, Christine provides her New York City clients with something more addictive than sex, the illusion of a perfect relationship.

While Christine has sex with her clients, this is not her selling point. Rather, it is her willingness to spend most of her time with them as if she was their girlfriend as she goes to Manhattan clubs, restaurants and movies with them. Indeed, while she doesn't always have sex with them, she always ends up listening to them. She does so with feigned empathy as they engage in meandering dialogues about their families, their jobs, and, most especially, their financial anxieties. Because, just as Shampoo is set in the hours before the 1968 election, The Girlfriend Experience captures the moments in the lives of Christine, her boyfriend and her clients in the days before the 2008 one.

Hence, her clients are terrified and disoriented as they live through the collapse of the financial system. Frustrated with their loss of control over their investments and businesses, they compensate by perpetually offering Christine financial advice. Invariably, they supply her with such insights as to buy gold, because there is no way of knowing when this is going to end. As you have probably already guessed, they never, with one exception, show any interest in her life, and they certainly don't want her to express any opinions beyond banalities such as I definitely think relationships are about communication, don't you?

Through their attainment of great wealth, Christine's clients therefore find themselves incapable of resisting the transformation of human relationships into a form of consumption whereby one can purchase a partner that will go to the movies that you want to see, listen raptuously to everything that you have to say and go to bed with you whenever you ask. In response to an inquisitive reporter's question as to whether she believes that there is anyone who wants her for who she is, she responds: If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn't be paying you. Yes, Christine gets it, even if the reporter does not. She gets paid precisely because she is willing to strip away those all too human qualities of annoyance, independence of mind, fatigue and disinterest that always manifest themselves periodically in any real relationship.

Christine provides, in effect, a simulacrum of a relationship, bringing to mind a quote from a great French film of the early 1970s: the simulacrum is superior to the original. Or, more precisely, the simulacrum is always more irresistable than the original, with all its imperfections. As Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times described the film: . . . an exquisitely filmed piece of urban impressionism that, unfortunately, leaves one feeling that a sleek gadget has been needlessly purchased. Implicitly analogizing Christine to a sleek gadget is an admittedly brilliant insight, but she is most assuredly not needlessly purchased. Soderbergh is telling us a cautionary adult fairy tale about how we have moved beyond the fetishism of objects to the fetishism of people.

Perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of the film is the extent to which Christine and her clients internalize the values of this world without question. The only collective ethos expressed by the characters is one of self-promotion and enrichment. They are incapable of the contemplative reflection of alternatives, even as one of the greatest speculative financial bubbles in history unwinds before them. Instead, they aspire to be among the few that escape the wreckage unscathed. The scriptwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, empower their characters to give expression to it through dialogue that is so banal, so spot on, as to be unintentionally hilarious. In fact, one can argue quite convincingly that The Girlfriend Experience is actually a black comedy.

Soderbergh and the scriptwriters tell this story by means of a narrative that is chronologically fragmented, with a visual emphasis upon cool, modernistic interiors of loft apartments, fashion boutiques, warehouses and restaurants. Colors are consciously drained of their vibrance. Overall, the effect is mildly claustrophobic, an urban environment lacking any spontaneity, one in which its protagonists measure their success by recourse to cynical calculation. Soderbergh has cited Antonioni's The Red Desert as an influence, but the precision of the compositions within an experimental narrative also invoke the work of Oshima Nagisa and Peter Greenaway as well. In this instance, Soderbergh exposes the soullessness of contemporary, neoliberal Manhatten much in the same way that Oshima did in regard to the utilitarian Tokyo of the late 1960s. There is an extreme formalism on display here, one deftly executed on a level commonly associated with the most daring and creative filmmakers.

Most impressively, the tone of the film is consistent throughout. Greenaway has said something to the effect that the challenge for a filmmaker is to take an idea and relentlessly follow it through to its conclusion, and Soderbergh accomplishes this difficult task here. Characters are portrayed in a low key naturalistic way devoid of sentimentality, paradoxically rendering them more accessible to audience identification. Rarely have I seen a film in which I was immediately able to recognize and relate to the characters upon contact as I was with this one. I was engrossed as I was carried forward from scene to scene. Predictably, critics get enmeshed with the fact that the lead, Grey, is also a porn star, and, in most instances, derided her performance. But I thought it was quite fine, because it seamlessly blended into the overall mood. Most professionally trained actresses would have brought an artifice to the role that engendered a more emotional audience response that undermined Soderbergh's intentions.

Labels: Film Notes, From the Archives, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Prior to 1979, China pursued economic and social policies consistent with the creation of an industrialized proletariat, often associated with the production of armaments, within a planned economy. Peasants subsidized it through the supply of agricultural commodities at state controlled prices while subject to restrictions upon their movement that made it extremely difficult for them to leave their villages. With the increasing emphasis upon market liberalization by Deng Xiaoping and his successors, state owned industry entered a period of inexorable decline, resulting in plant closures and commercial redevelopment.

Several years ago, Wang Bing profiled this phenomenon in his epic, West of the Tracks, a nine hour documentary set in the massive Tie Xie industrial district in Shenyang, Manchuria. With an astonishing visual and narrative sensibility, one marked by neorealistic characterization and striking industrial compositions, Bing patiently presented the last months before the closure of the few remaining factories in the district, the attachment that the workers had for them and the breaking of the iron rice bowl, as housing for the workers was being torn down to make way for commercial development. A communal, collective way of life was destroyed as part of the price for admission into a neoliberal, globalized economy. Bing gently presented the workers to us with an intimacy absent sentimentality or voyeurism.

In the US and Europe, indeed, perhaps, most of the rest of the world, the Cultural Revolution is accepted as the most turbulent period of recent Chinese history, but Bing suggests that market liberalization has been equally traumatic. Jia Zhangke appears to have come to a similar conclusion in his most recent film, 24 City, or, perhaps, more accurately, he has determined that the entire period of Chinese Communist Party rule has been one characterized by the harsh ebbs and flows of modernization. He imputes great significance to his protagonists, the workers within Factory 420: The story of these characters represent the last fifty years of Chinese history.

As you might expect, Jia is being hyperbolic. The peasant experience is pretty much absent in 24 City. Even so, the experiences of the workers of Factory 420 opens a window towards understanding the social transformation resulting from the embrace of market liberalization, as he interviewed over 130 people who worked there. The film itself is an innovative blend of documentary and fiction, with Jia presenting the stories of four people connected to the factory through five of the interviewees themselves and four subsequent ones through actors and actresses. He made the decision to adopt this technique because of his belief that history is a mixture of fact and imagination. As a consequence of the incorporation of fiction within a documentary narrative structure, the film is more straightforward than Jia's previous ones which are noteworthy for their elliptical storytelling methods, although engagement with the content of what the interviewees, both real and fictional, say presents the challenges common to his other films. His mastery of color, along with his feel for architecture and interior design, are everywhere in evidence as expressed through his compelling compositions, with the most startling departure being his interweaving of more realistic scenes, such as an interview of an elderly former 420 employee traveling across Chengdu on a bus, seemingly recorded with a hand held digital camera in one long take.

By way of background, Factory 420 was opened in Chengdu in southwestern China in 1958 for the purpose of manufacturing parts for military aircraft. Prior to that time, facilities for the manufacture of military weapons were located in Manchuria, but, after such facilities were subjected to American bombing during the Korean War, the Chinese Communist Party adopted Mao's strategy of moving such production outside the reach of both American and Soviet airstrikes. One suspects that he was influenced by the Soviet experience in World War II, wherein much of the country's industrial platform was successfully transported away from the Ukraine to Siberia. During the 1980s, the workers shifted from producing military aircraft parts to appliances for the consumer market. Within the last few years, as has happened many times across China, investors brought forth a proposal for destroying the aging factory, relocating it somewhere else on the periphery of the city with modern manufacturing technology, and undoubtedly fewer workers, so as to free the land for residential and commercial development. The site was quite appealing, because of its centrality within the city, and the developers christened the project, 24 City, a name purportedly taken from a classical Chinese poem about Chengdu.

During an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Jia said that he first thought about making 24 City after he finished Platform in 2000:

This makes sense as the narratives of Platform and 24 City traverse similar terrain within their own unique social contexts. While Platform deals with the coming of age of a young music and theatrical troup forced to adapt to the rapid transformation from Maoism to the market in the 1980s, the industrial protagonists of 24 City live through a similar experience over a longer time frame. Both groups experience the turbulence of migration, market liberalization and the abandonment of collective ideals for individual ones. At the conclusion of each, a sympathetic young character, in Platform, a male one, in 24 City a female one, finds themselves esconsced in a new world of consumption and commodification, where, ironically, their new found individuality, and the individuality of those around them, have been fused into a mass of conformity. Baudrillard recognized such an outcome forty years ago when he observed that the young woman who selects a hair style popularized by a famous model or actress sees herself as engaging in act of personal expression even as thousands, if not tens of thousands, select the same one.

Prior to the production of the film, Jia also said that his purpose was to tell a story about three women in the 50s, the 70s, and the present day, as society makes the transition from collectivism to individualism. By doing so within a larger narrative that also interweaves male experience as well, he grounds gender within a complex mosaic of social transformation. First, there is the paradox that within the collectivism of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, people retained a surprisingly high degree of individuality within their personal lives. Or, rather, people carved out more and more individual space for themselves over the course of this collectivist period, so much so that, upon the introduction of market liberalization by Deng, it disintegrated. By the beginning of the 21st Century, with the collectivism of the past a fading memory, the workers of Factory 420 discovered that they were now at the mercy of a new social system that considered them and their experiences as superfluous.

Consistent with this, Jia has also observed that it is important to record memories that are disappearing all over contemporary China. So, much so that he has abandoned previous notions of films as entertainment. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not limited to China. One of Fassbinder's greatest, most idiosyncratic films, In a Year of 13 Moons, confronts precisely this subject, the extent to which the lived experiences of marginalized people are erased with the passage of time, with the assistance of finance capital. In this film, even the wealthy Jewish commercial real estate developer, the man who had participated in the postwar destruction of many of Frankfurt's old residential neighborhoods and the expulsion of the people who lived in them, finds himself facing obsolescence and irrelevance. In the world according to Fassbinder, everyone faces the prospect of becoming marginalized as a result of the acceleration of social change generated by finance capital, an acceleration too seductive to reject. There are echoes of this in the conclusion of 24 City, as Jia's last, fictionalized interviewee, a young woman raised by 420 workers, looks out from the roof of a highrise office tower across an urbanized, commercialized Chengdu that spreads in all directions as far as the eye can see. No one, not even the investors and developers of 24 City itself, can resist the reductionist power of capitalism in its current form.

Second, upon hearing the interviewees, one is tempted to ascribe a male cast to the collectivism of the past and a female one to the individualism of the present. To a certain extent, this is true, as the female characters reveal the attainment of more and more independence with the passage of time. Accordingly, it is hard to resist associating such independence with the adoption of the market liberalization measures associated with neoliberalism. And, there is some truth to this, although the use of the word independence to describe it may not be entirely accurate. Instead, it is evident that women have obtained greater autonomy within their families and their societies during this neoliberal era, even as they, in most instances, become more and more financially insecure, and the interviewees give concrete expression to this over the course of the film: an elderly woman relates how difficult it was for her to find a job in the early 1990s are being laid off at Factory 420; a middle aged one describes how she left Shanghai to work in Factory 420 and refused all suitors for marriage, living, she says, as many of her divorced female friends who got married and divorced do; a young, twenty or thirtysomething one expresses her shock at seeing her mother, also laid off at Factory 420, working elsewhere under brutal conditions at a telephone pole manufacturing plant even as she now travels to Hong Kong as a fashion buyer for wealthy Chengdu women.

Conversely, men, who, during the collectivist period, were exhalted as the embodiment of a privileged, industrial proletariat, exhalted, in effect, for their physical labor, are now defined by other achievements. The first interviewee, one of the people who actually worked in Factory 420, relates the pride that he and his coworkers took in their work ethic, their skill and their commitment to one another. He recalls a beloved supervisor who told them that must not casually dispose of an old tool because they should remember all the hands through which the tool had passed. Upon being prodded by the off camera interviewer, he theerafter notes the Cultural Revolution, but says little about it, so it remains the story that remains untold, at least in a Chinese social context outside the literature generated by its educated victims, the source of memories that even Jia cannot record. The interviewee does, however, imply that his supervisor was removed from his position during the Cultural Revolution, and that it initiated an irreversible process whereby working class support for collectivization and the planned economy unraveled.

Fast forward to the last, fictional, male interviewee, and one hears something very different. Like the last, fictional female interviewee, he is a child of Factory 420 parents. He recalls being sent to Manchuria when he was 16 years old to apprentice in a factory there. He briefly enjoyed performing his assigned task, a repetitive one that involved smoothing a metal component of some kind. But, after about an hour, he decided that he wanted to go back to Chengdu, and, against the wishes of his father, he did so. Here, Jia takes aim at the fact that, unlike the generation of the first interviewee, subsequent generations of people connected to Factory 420 found work industrial manufacturing work increasingly tedious, and seized almost any opportunity to do something else. After returning home, the last interviewee succeeded in becoming an anchor of a popular Chengdu television program. Just as with the young woman who goes to Shanghai to select and buy clothes for wealthy Chengdu women, he is considered emblematic of a generation that now defines success by one's ability to escape the factory and obtain a well paying position within some form of the culture industry. In their shadow are millions upon millions of Chinese who continue to work in a contemporary manufacturing sector under conditions that Isabel Hinton has described as evocative of those of 1840s Manchester.

Labels: China, Film Notes, Neoliberalism, YouTube

I have always said that I have been more influenced by filmmakers like Oshima Nagisa and Rainer Werner Fassbinder than I have been by political theorists. This is primarily because I respond more to the human experience as related artistically, especially in film, and, secondarily literature, than through social and political theory. Not surprisingly, I find sociological works that interpret the world around us more subjectively through oral interviews quite compelling as well. Some of you may have encountered my comments on the indybay site under the pseudonym RWF.

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered a Counterpunch article about the death of the left academic Giovanni Arrighi, and this passage caused me to recall Oshima and Fassbinder:

He was a very, very good teacher. I recall that some classmate or other had presented a criticism of some reading, a fairly convincing one I think we all thought after hearing it. Arrighi commented, “You have only criticized that theory for its weaknesses. You can’t defeat an argument by attacking its weaknesses, you have to attack its strengths. And if you can identify the weaknesses it only means that you yourself could construct a better version of the same argument, so you have a responsibility to first construct that better version and then attack that one.”

Both Oshima and Fassbinder subjected the world around them to this sort of evaluation and exposure. In particular, the passage reminded me of one of Fassbinder's last films, Lola. The film is properly understood as a garish, extravagant, high contrast color remake of Sternberg's masterpiece, The Blue Angel. But whereas The Blue Angel remains one of the most disturbing and depressing examinations of the submission of people to authoritarian social constraints, Lola, transposed to the German economic miracle of the 1950s, celebrates the joys of capitalism even as it displays the transitory inadequacy of them.

The plot is fairly straightforward. A building commissioner, von Bohm, arrives in a moderate sized German city after being released from a Russian POW camp. He proceeds to apply technocratic socialist principles of planned development to the projects under his supervision. Not surprisingly, he immediately runs afoul of a corrupt developer, Schukert, and his political supporters. He also falls in love with Lola, a cabaret singer/prostitute who conceals her true vocation. As you might have guessed, one of her most important clients is Schukert.

As is typical, Fassbinder utilizes this triangle to explore the social and economic relationships in which the characters find themselves enmeshed instead of highlighting their emotional conflict. Most importantly, he reveals why the Germans found it so difficult to resist the allure of capitalism after World War II. Put simply, the money, the power, the sex, the prestige, even the competition . . . it was just all too much fun. Schukert, portrayed in larger than life style by Mario Adorf, gives expression to it through his engaging personality and the delight that he takes in giving free rein to his appetites. Schukert is yet another of Fassbinder's appealing capitalists, one who gets his way as much through the force of his likeable personality as through his money and influence.

By contrast, von Bohm, performed with a sympathetic, naive rectitude by Armin Mueller-Stahl, and his subordinate, the anarchist Esslin, presented as an inflexible moralist, infected with the autocratic values of the past, simply cannot motivate others to withstand the inducements of Schukert. All three find themselves vying for the attention of Lola, soft hearted, yet harshly practical as required. Barbara Sukowa brings out these qualities in a skillfully modulated peformance. At the end of the day, Esslin is completely marginalized and von Bohm, despite his sober Social Democracy, succumbs. If you are familiar with Fassbinder's personal life, you will recognize that the ending references his marriage to Ingrid Caven. The film is available on DVD.

Labels: Film Notes, YouTube

When my wife and son are away, I get to indulge myself in one of my favorite pastimes, watching movies. First, there was The Girlfriend Experience last Sunday, then Summer Hours while biking around San Francisco on Wednesday.

Summer Hours is a French family story centered around the decisions that the siblings must make in relation to the estate left by their deceased mother, a warm, beautiful country home filled with the artwork, sculptures and furnishings acquired during the her life through her association with her uncle, a respected, if now largely forgotten, artist. The French, it seems, are no longer special, and even the French have reconciled themselves to it.

Assayas, the writer and director, tells the story through a conventional narrative in his typically naturalistic style of subdued light and color. His emphasis is upon our integrated experiences of work, family and culture as it has evolved over time. Early on, we discover that France is no longer a large enough canvas to contain the ambitions of its middle class. Helene, the matriarch, is celebrating her 75th birthday with her three children and their grandchildren. One of her sons, Jeremie, is a business executive in China, while her daughter, Adrienne, is a designer living in New York. Only Frederic, her other son, remains in France as a professor of economics in Paris.

Over the course of the film, we discover that Jeremie left to work in China because of the lack of similar opportunities in the European Union, and a promotion to Beijing means that it is unlikely that he will ever return to France. Similarly, Adrienne has become so acclimatized to life in the US, with an impending second marriage, that her time in France will be even more limited. Only Frederic has followed path that has allowed him to preserve his French cultural identity. Adrienne and Jeremie have been scattered by the winds of globalization, a wind that has also worn away the prestige formerly accorded academics like Frederic.

The family estate is an allegorical repository of the French cultural heritage. Full of paintings, sculptures, panels, furniture and vases, they are subjected to the process of classification and categorization that Edward Said identified as central to the French imperial enterprise in Egypt. A country that once imposed its cultural standards upon others finds itself experiencing the same processes of subordination. The family is caught between the contradictory hopes of keeping this rich collection within France or maximizing potential profit from the sale of it.

Assayas returns to an old theme, the means by which the intellectualization and monetization of art go hand in hand. At one point, Frederic permits Helene's servant to take any vase that she wants. She selects one that she often used to display flowers, without knowing that it was crafted by a well known 19th Century modernist. As she walks home with it, she talks to herself about how she selected something ordinary, because, after all, what would do with something that carries the burden of artistic achievement. The scene recalls one from an earlier Assayas flim, Late August, Early September, a scene where the teen aged lover of a deceased novelist of the May '68 generation receives a Keith Haring print from him through his will. She keeps the print under her bed, connected to it because of its emotional content as opposed to its desirability if offered at an art auction. Similarly, Helene's servant is drawn to the vase as a memorialization of their relationship.

Assayas counterposes an alternative appreciation of art as an expression of our experiences and relationships as a substitution for the abstractions of intellectual content and financial value. Other Assayas preoccupations also emerge. For example, his interest in the shadow that May '68 casts over its progeny and those that follow manifests itself when a police officer informs Frederic that his daughter, Sylvie, has been arrested for shoplifting. The officer also tells Frederic that he discovered a useable amount of a controlled substance in her purse. Frederic can't say much, as he uses marijuana himself, but involuntarily starts making parental demands about the boyfriend that he believes must invariably be involved, understanding all along that he is acting precisely like his parents did, and the parents of the May '68 generation did. For Assayas, renewal lies along a path of youthful transgression, a path that he personally traveled and addressed fictionally in his 1994 film, Cold Water.

Hence, Assayas suggests that another world is possible when Sylvie and her friends have a party at the estate at the conclusion of the film. They immediately proceed to plug in stereo equipment and computers and blast out music throughout the house. They respect the house, and yet this respect does not prevent them from putting it to their own uses, to incorporate their own social identity into it. Sylvie leaves the house and takes her boyfriend to a place where she and Helene watched the harvesting of fruit when she was a little girl. Despite the rational calculations of responsible adults, the young and the old will inevitably preserve and renew France as a lived experience as opposed to the warehousing of artifacts.

Labels: Film Notes, France, Neoliberalism

Looking back wistfully, Hal Ashby attempted to capture the zeitgeist of that period when the expanding horizons of the 1960s imperceptibly receded. He did so by profiling the life of a popular, libidinous Southern California hair dresser in the final hours leading to the 1968 election. The movie was, of course, Shampoo, and Warren Beatty portrayed the hair dresser, George Roundy, in one of his best performances. Roundy discovers that the power of money and the need for emotional security trumps the willingness of people to take the risks required to achieve personal fulfillment.

Over three decades later, Stephen Soderbergh has remade Shampoo, but, apparently, in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to most people, even movie critics. In The Girlfriend Experience, a high end call girl, Christine, portrayed by Sasha Grey, a porn star, navigates her way through a world that Roundy could have only vaguely anticipated, a world where the circuits of capitalist exchange have moved beyond the commodification of sex to the commodification of personal relationships themselves. In a disjointed narrative that remains faithful to the broad outline of Shampoo, Christine provides her New York City clients with something more addictive than sex, the illusion of a perfect relationship.

While Christine has sex with her clients, this is not her selling point. Rather, it is her willingness to spend most of her time with them as if she was their girlfriend as she goes to Manhattan clubs, restaurants and movies with them. Indeed, while she doesn't always have sex with them, she always ends up listening to them. She does so with feigned empathy as they engage in meandering dialogues about their families, their jobs, and, most especially, their financial anxieties. Because, just as Shampoo is set in the hours before the 1968 election, The Girlfriend Experience captures the moments in the lives of Christine, her boyfriend and her clients in the days before the 2008 one.

Hence, her clients are terrified and disoriented as they live through the collapse of the financial system. Frustrated with their loss of control over their investments and businesses, they compensate by perpetually offering Christine financial advice. Invariably, they supply her with such insights as to buy gold, because there is no way of knowing when this is going to end. As you have probably already guessed, they never, with one exception, show any interest in her life, and they certainly don't want her to express any opinions beyond banalities such as I definitely think relationships are about communication, don't you?

Through their attainment of great wealth, Christine's clients therefore find themselves incapable of resisting the transformation of human relationships into a form of consumption whereby one can purchase a partner that will go to the movies that you want to see, listen raptuously to everything that you have to say and go to bed with you whenever you ask. In response to an inquisitive reporter's question as to whether she believes that there is anyone who wants her for who she is, she responds: If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn't be paying you. Yes, Christine gets it, even if the reporter does not. She gets paid precisely because she is willing to strip away those all too human qualities of annoyance, independence of mind, fatigue and disinterest that always manifest themselves periodically in any real relationship.

Christine provides, in effect, a simulacrum of a relationship, bringing to mind a quote from a great French film of the early 1970s: the simulacrum is superior to the original. Or, more precisely, the simulacrum is always more irresistable than the original, with all its imperfections. As Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times described the film: . . . an exquisitely filmed piece of urban impressionism that, unfortunately, leaves one feeling that a sleek gadget has been needlessly purchased. Implicitly analogizing Christine to a sleek gadget is an admittedly brilliant insight, but she is most assuredly not needlessly purchased. Soderbergh is telling us a cautionary adult fairy tale about how we have moved beyond the fetishism of objects to the fetishism of people.

Perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of the film is the extent to which Christine and her clients internalize the values of this world without question. The only collective ethos expressed by the characters is one of self-promotion and enrichment. They are incapable of the contemplative reflection of alternatives, even as one of the greatest speculative financial bubbles in history unwinds before them. Instead, they aspire to be among the few that escape the wreckage unscathed. The scriptwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, empower their characters to give expression to it through dialogue that is so banal, so spot on, as to be unintentionally hilarious. In fact, one can argue quite convincingly that The Girlfriend Experience is actually a black comedy.

Soderbergh and the scriptwriters tell this story by means of a narrative that is chronologically fragmented, with a visual emphasis upon cool, modernistic interiors of loft apartments, fashion boutiques, warehouses and restaurants. Colors are consciously drained of their vibrance. Overall, the effect is mildly claustrophobic, an urban environment lacking any spontaneity, one in which its protagonists measure their success by recourse to cynical calculation. Soderbergh has cited Antonioni's The Red Desert as an influence, but the precision of the compositions within an experimental narrative also invoke the work of Oshima Nagisa and Peter Greenaway as well. In this instance, Soderbergh exposes the soullessness of contemporary, neoliberal Manhatten much in the same way that Oshima did in regard to the utilitarian Tokyo of the late 1960s. There is an extreme formalism on display here, one deftly executed on a level commonly associated with the most daring and creative filmmakers.

Most impressively, the tone of the film is consistent throughout. Greenaway has said something to the effect that the challenge for a filmmaker is to take an idea and relentlessly follow it through to its conclusion, and Soderbergh accomplishes this difficult task here. Characters are portrayed in a low key naturalistic way devoid of sentimentality, paradoxically rendering them more accessible to audience identification. Rarely have I seen a film in which I was immediately able to recognize and relate to the characters upon contact as I was with this one. I was engrossed as I was carried forward from scene to scene. Predictably, critics get enmeshed with the fact that the lead, Grey, is also a porn star, and, in most instances, derided her performance. But I thought it was quite fine, because it seamlessly blended into the overall mood. Most professionally trained actresses would have brought an artifice to the role that engendered a more emotional audience response that undermined Soderbergh's intentions.

Labels: Film Notes, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube